Confidential Computing: Who Can See Your VM’s Memory?

You encrypt data at rest and in transit. But what protects it while your applications are using it? Recorded at VMware Explore 2026, this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast features Bob Plankers and Nick Ford for a practical look at confidential computing and protecting data in use. Learn how confidential VMs use Intel and AMD hardware technologies to isolate workloads and help protect sensitive memory from privileged access, including access by infrastructure administrators. The conversation covers trusted execution environments, where confidential computing makes sense, performance considerations, and the operational tradeoffs discussed at Explore. Bob and Nick also explain how existing applications can move into confidential VMs without code changes, and why planning for attestation, key delivery, and data access matters just as much as enabling the technology. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 01:00 What is confidential computing? 02:10 Hardware protection and how it differs from a TPM 03:10 Trust, attestation, and choosing workloads 04:38 Resilience and vMotion considerations 05:25 Performance and security overhead 06:46 Virtualization benefits and reducing trust in operators 08:03 Multi-tenant environments and sensitive data 08:55 Snapshots and operational limitations 10:06 Working toward feature parity 10:44 Getting started without application code changes 11:39 Evolving threats and customer conversations 12:40 Where to learn more Subscribe to the VMware Cloud Foundation YouTube channel for more technical conversations and episodes from VMware Explore 2026. #VMwareExplore #ConfidentialComputing #VMwareCloudFoundation #Cybersecurity #VirtuallySpeaking